The problem I see with the 4 hour 'no reward' window is it:
- punishes 'genuine' curators (those that are liking stuff because it's good, irrespective of whether they personally receive rewards). I don't think most regular folk are going to see a good article then wait 3 or 4 hours before voting. They'll just vote and get on with their day. Happy that the author gets some reward.
- rewards the cynical vote (there will be those that will be prepared to wait 4 hours before liking a posts that has likes from good 'geniune' curators). I'm sure people will still be able to create a bot that checks if the post is 4 hours old before voting!
Maybe an alternative solution, would be to encourage 'whales' to 'wait' 4 hours before voting on some of the posts they like. That way those that genuine curators get rewarded for spotting stuff first, before the bandwagon jumpers get in. Obviously this isn't perfect as it penalises the whales to an extent.
Ultimately, I think the issue is borne out of there being not enough content (and not enough curators). Once there is streams (rather than trickles) of content, it will be harder to bandwagon jump as there will be too many wagons to choose from!
Reduced rewards for voting after a post is already popular is not "punishing" those later voters, it is just recognizing reality that those votes are in a sense less valuable. I say in a sense because votes can be interpreted on different scales. If something goes from 0-100 votes, it is less valuable for it to get one more vote, but still probably extremely valuable for it to gets to a million votes. So something that discourages or even fails to reward votes 101-999999 is not necessarily the desired incentive structure.
My point was that disabling curator rewards for the first 4 hours punishes the early genuine voters that choose to cast their vote inside that window. Most regular folk would upvote and get on with their day, rather than wait to be eligible for rewards.
I agree, later voters should get less.
This is how I imagine @smooth's proposal visualized... and a little bit tweaked ;)
y0 = first voter reward
y1 = latest voter reward
x = time
bots would found at y0 position and the best humman curators at the top of the parabola !
PS bots should not shutdown (they still are valuable)... just let the human's get rewarded better for their efforts!
This bot detected images from a legacy source and decided autonomously
to upload them to the InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS)! The upload was
successfull and the pictures can be found here:
orig: https://i.imgsafe.org/fe709b3037.jpg desc: hash: QmRDXEaVSekJnuuj8GSQw4LL9C8hLBFhCanGbmZXd4Usoc/fe709b3037.jpgI don't think it would be too different to program a bot to circumvent this. You just delay the bot placing the vote until the reward period starts.